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Monday, March 20, 2017

a monday matinee...

14 comments:

Star time lapse test - southern view. Canon T3i with Neewer Pro 8mm f/3.5 Aspherical HD Fisheye Lens. A Polaroid intervalometer triggered 720 thirty second JPEG exposures (3.2 gig total file size) shot @ f3.5 - ISO 1600. High ISO noise reduction set to standard. Long exposure noise reduction disabled to extend battery life. If you look closely, you can see some dead pixels - tiny spots that are not moving. Started at 8:49 PM and ran until the camera battery died at 4:53 AM. That is the moon rising at the end - the camera and lens were covered with dew by that time (no damage). Images compiled in Windows Movie Maker (rendered at .09 seconds per photo) and exported to Adobe Premiere Elements. Only did some slight brightness, contrast, and hue adjustments - no batch processing in Adobe Lightroom...will save that for later in the summer when the Milky Way is in full bloom. News Theme by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...) Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Prelude No. 18 by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/preludes/Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/

Wow, John, that is so neat. I liked it when daylight came. That ball of Sun is so bright. They say the Sun will collide with earth in 200 Million years or sometime. But where was the moon? I have to look at it again. And I wonder which ones are government spy satellites. We have them around San Antonio and up in Alaska, I hear. TY for this. You are getting better and better, very professional.

Very nicely done, John, dead pixels or not. They actually made me think, wait, what celestial bodies are there that don't move through the sky like the others?

The condensation solar-effect on the rising moon, though serendipitous, is spectacular. If you hadn't revealed how it happened, one helluva lot of people would be wondering how the heck you did it and would consider you quite the magician. I like that you choose to document and display all the settings and gear used.

Cool that you're now using Lightroom, too. I teach Lightroom 6/CC and find it to be an extremely handy program. It will become even more and more useful as you learn all the benefits and tricks of the various modules.

You're in the perfect spot to start astro-photography. Big Bend is a prime dark sky spot, one of the best in the world (darksky.org/). I'm headed back out that way, hopefully, within a month to do some of my own astro-photography with a D810a, as well as do a bunch of other shooting with my other gear.

Looking forward to seeing what other night sky shooting you do as you get more and more into Monday Matinees and Friday Night Films.

That is so cool! Thanks for posting the technical details. I've not yet played with my intervalometer, that's on the list for May. I wondered about the stationary spots. At first I thought the two I saw were planets, then I saw the others. Does your DSLR have one of those battery grips?

Allen Cowan...yes, I used a battery grip with two rechargeable Wasabi Power 7.2V 2000mAh batteries. Replaces the single Canon LP-E8 7.2V 1120mAh battery. A little over 8 hours of shooting time is pretty good considering the long exposures.